How to Gain Muscle

Stimulating Growth

In the nutrition section you can read more about how to gain muscle mass in regards of what foods to eat. Here you can read the basics of strength and resistance training for optimal muscle growth. Learn how much weight you should use for each exercise, how many reps and sets to perform and what resting periods you should apply.

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Stimulating Growth

How can you optimize your workout routines for gaining muscle? Apart from the kind of exercises you choose and how much weight you use, the most important part is how many repetitions you will do for each exercise.

Rep range:

It is important to know how many repetitions you need to do. The following guidelines are most commonly used:

Muscle Endurance: 12+ repetitions

Muscle mass (hypertrophy): 8 á 12 repetitions

Strength: 5-6 repetitions or less

Amount of weight used:

Muscle Endurance: 60% or less of 1RM*

Muscle mass / hypertrophy: 75-85% of 1RM*

Strength: 85-90% of 1RM*

Sets and exercises

Some like to use 1-3 sets and do 8 different exercises on a given workout day. Others might use 5 to 8 sets for only 2 or 3 exercises. You will need to experiment with all this. Keep in mind that the amount of repetitions is also important. Doing 5 sets of 20 repetitions for 6 exercises usually do not fit in one workout routine!

What kind of exercises should you do?

Compound exercises are the ones that use more than just one muscle group. The opposite would be isolation exercises that will only focus on one particular muscle.

*1RM = one repetitions maximum. It is as easy as it sounds. This is the amount of weight you can lift for a given exercise for only one single repetition. Please note that the percentages I gave here are just my estimations of how much you will need to use. Some will use different figures, but the numbers I give are all in the range of what other fitness trainers recommend.

Of course there are a lot more examples, but this will just give you an idea of what exercises are compound or isolation ones. What compound exercises do is target a lot more muscles than isolation. The more muscles you target at once, the more stimulus you will get. It has also been said that compound exercises stimulate testosterone production, which is needed for muscle growth!